Hardwired (8 page)

“I am comforted as hell to hear that, Arkady Mikhailovich.” Cowboy knows Arkady will have paid off a lot of his costs with the other thirdmen, who wanted the Missouri privateers broken as much as he did.

There is a pause on the other end as Arkady digests this:

“I want you to come back,” Arkady says. Cowboy can hear the sounds of temper as if from far away. The thirdman’s voice drums on and on, every plosive a barrage. “But I fixed up that machine for a reason, and I don’t want you to come back without it. And I don’t want you to come back without having used it. Understand? Those fucking privateers are gonna get what’s coming to ’em.”

“Ten-four,” Cowboy says, and before Arkady can ask what the fuck ten-four is supposed to mean, Cowboy opens his throttles and the howl, heard with utter clarity over Arkady’s mic, buries Arkady’s speech beneath its alcohol shriek. Though he can’t hear Arkady anymore, Cowboy is fairly certain that the distant yammering he’s hearing through his sockets contains a fair amount of abuse. He smiles.

“Adios, muchachitos.” Cowboy laughs, and takes the panzer off the road. The farmer here, a friend of free enterprise and true, is getting paid for his wheat being trampled every so often, and Cowboy is going to have a clear run for the Line. The radar detectors pick up only weak signals from far away and Cowboy knows no one’s looking at him.

The beast roars like the last lonely dinosaur and trembles as it gains way. Mental indicators climb their columns from blue to green to orange. Ripe wheat straw flies out behind in a plume. Cowboy has a steel guitar playing a lonesome cadenza somewhere in his mind. He cranks up the flame and is doing over a hundred when he blazes through some poor citizen’s bobwire and crosses the Line.

His lidar is forward-looking and strictly limited: it’s to keep him out of pits and gullies and let him know when there might be a house or vehicle sitting in his way. It sends out a fairly weak signal and it shouldn’t be detected by anything unless the detector is so close the first contact would be visual anyway. Kansas has most of its defenses out this way, and if he trips anything, it should be now.

The horizon is a blur of dark emptiness marked by an occasional silo. Any enemy radars are far away. The moon rises and the engines howl and Cowboy keeps his speed in check so as not to raise a dust signature that might be picked up on radar. He wants to save his systems for the real test. Missouri. Where the privateers crouch in the sky, snarling and ready to spring. Cattle scatter from the panzer’s scream. Robot harvesters sweep through the fields, standing like stately alien sentinels in pools of brilliant light, moving alone, unable to detect the panzer as it sweeps across the land. Cowboy gets a stronger radar signal to the north and knows a picket plane is coming his way. The panzer’s absorbent camouflage paint sucks up radar signal like a thirsty elephant, but Cowboy slows and turns, lowering his infrared profile and making a wide swing away from any trouble. The picket plane moves on, undisturbed. Mobile towers loom up like Neolithic monuments, awesomely expensive derricks built to inject a special bacteria into the bedrock below the eroded topsoil, bugs that will break down the stone and make new soil. Another eroded farm foreclosed by an Orbital bloc–– no small farmer could afford to replace topsoil this way. Cowboy suppresses a desire to ram the derricks and snarls at them instead.

The panzer crosses the Little Arkansas south of McPherson, and Cowboy knows he’ll make it across Kansas without trouble. The defenses are behind him. The only trouble will come if he rides right across the track of a state trooper when crossing a road, and even then the authorities will have to somehow scramble a chopper in time. He doesn’t think it will happen.

And it doesn’t. In the deep violet shadow of some crumbling grain silos near Gridley the panzer sweeps out of the darkness and scares the bejesus out of the sleeping kid in the cab of the fuel truck. Cowboy cycles his engines down and waits for the sweet cool alcohol to settle into the tanks. Already he can feel the pulsing radars questing out from the Missouri line. Stronger than anything he’s seen yet. The privateers are not going to be easy.

“They’re undercapitalized, Cowboy,” Arkady had told him. “They can’t afford to lose any equipment. They’ve got to score a lot of successes right away and get some cargo. Otherwise they’re in trouble.”

Since the Rock War, the U.S.A. had been balkanized far beyond the wildest dreams of the old states’ rights crowd. The so-called central government no longer had its hands on interstate commerce and the result was a wild rush to impose tariffs all across the Midwest. In the West, close to the spaceports in California and Texas where the finished goods came down from the factories in orbit, the borders were free, but the Midwest saw no reason why it shouldn’t profit from anything crossing its territory. A heavy duty was slammed on goods that passed through the states en route to elsewhere.

Which left the Northeast out of luck, as far as the distribution of Orbital-built products was concerned. They got some from the spaceports in the Florida Free Zone, but the Free Zone was under bloc control, and the Orbitals like to keep the market hungry for their product. Artificial scarcity was the name of the game, and the Northeast paid with its dwindling wealth for the scraps the Orbitals doled out. The West had more to offer the Orbitals, and the goods were cheaper and more abundant there–– cheap enough to ship them to the markets in the Northeast at a fat profit, so long as there wasn’t much duty to pay along the way.

And so the first atmosphere jocks rode their supersonic deltas across the Alley with their midnight loads of contraband. And the Midwest responded, first by sending up radar planes and armed interceptor aircraft, then, when the action shifted from planes to panzers, by strengthening their ground defenses.

And now, in Missouri, by licensing privateers. The states were unable to keep up with the changes in smuggling technology, and so they decided instead to license a local corporation to chase the contraband for them. The fact that the Constitution authorized only the federal government to grant letters of marque and reprisal had been ignored; the Constitution is a dead letter anyway, in the face of Orbital superiority.

The privateers are authorized to shoot to kill, and in addition to a hefty bounty are rewarded by ownership, free and clear, of whatever contraband they can secure. Reports spoke of impressive arrays of airborne radar, of heat sensors and weird sound detectors and aircraft full of sensing missiles and bristling with guns.

From Gridley Cowboy moves slowly northeast, taking his time, mapping the flying radar arrays. They are drone aircraft, ultralights under robot control, solar-powered to stay aloft forever, rising with the sun and gliding slowly earthward at night, only having to return to base for servicing every couple of months or so. They are in constant microwave communication with computers on the ground, ready to scramble aircraft if anything suspicious pops up. They are so light that radar-homing missiles can’t find them to shoot them down, and antiradiation homers would be spotted as they climbed, in plenty of time for the arrays to switch off before the missile arrives.

Cowboy is aiming for the wide area between New Kansas City and the Ozarks. People in the Ozarks are friendly, he knows, with a tradition of resistance to the people they call “the laws” that goes back at least to Cole Younger, but the terrain is too restrictive. Cowboy wants a fast run over the flat. The fact that this part of the state is where the privateers have concentrated their defenses is just a pleasant coincidence.

The sensor drones are turning lazy circles in the air as they glide downward on battery power, and Cowboy thinks he sees a pattern building that will allow him to slide into a blind spot that might last until he’s fifty miles the other side of the Missouri border. As his panzer slides down the crumbling banks of the Marais des Cygnes and tears across flat mudbanks and muddy water, it extrudes a directional antenna and spits a coded message to the west, to where Arkady and the Dodger wait in Arkady’s aircraft, turning its own circles over the plains of eastern Colorado.

The answering signal comes quickly, a strong broadcast to Arkady’s people on the Kansas– Missouri border. There are other panzerboys out there, standing ready by their vehicles, waiting for the word... and when they receive it, their own panzers will hit the plains, moving swiftly and then stopping, tearing through fields in zigzag patterns, sending dust signatures aloft, tracking radar and infrared patterns across the computer displays of the privateers. The laws will have to expend a lot of effort tracking them down and apprehending them. And when found, the decoy panzerboys will surrender meekly enough---since they carry no contraband and will only be fined for the amount of bobwire they flattened during their runs, and maybe do a little time for reckless endangerment. Arkady will cover the fines and legal fees, as well as their generous salaries. If the worst happens, their widows and orphans will have the benefit of insurance. It’s well-paid work, and a training ground for ambitious panzerboys who want to run the Line.

But after the signal to the other panzerboys comes the Dodger’s voice, dry as the Portales plains. “Arkady Mikhailovich would appreciate a little more information, here, Cowboy,” he says. “He wants to know why you didn’t report earlier. ”

“They can trace a message these days, Dodger.”

The Dodger is silent for a while, getting a lecture from Arkady no doubt, and when his voice returns, it is less good-humored. “A squirt transmission via microwave is next to untraceable,” he says. “Arkady says you should have reported when you got past the Kansas Defenses.”

“Sorry,” Cowboy says cheerfully. “But I’m damn close to the Missouri line right now and I would just as soon not have to keep up this conversation while I’m trying to work.”

There is another pause. “Arkady reminds you that he has a big investment in your panzer, and he wants to be kept informed of what his investment is doing.”

“I aim to give him a nice return on his money,” Cowboy says. “I don’t plan to waste time with a lot of chatter. I’ve got a window right now, and I’m taking it. See you.” And he switches off, making a note to send Arkady some worry beads from the East when he gets there.

The panzer climbs out of the Marais des Cygnes and increases its speed as it begins its run east. The drumming of corn on the bow increases to a steady hammer. Engine gauges are running orange to red. Green lights everywhere else. Steel guitars sing like angels in the mind and Missouri wails a siren song in accompaniment. Delivering the mail is a splendid thing. The decoy panzerboys are causing a stir, and more radar arrays are being turned on, the ones unused so far in the hope their sudden appearance will catch the smugglers by surprise.

Cowboy’s blind spot is still a blank. He throws caution to the wind and decides to red out the engines. A half-heard message from his body signals he is being punched back in his seat, but he’s got other things to think about. The panzer is airborne half the time, tearing up the low hills and flying over the crests, throwing corn and scattering wire, its voice a madwoman’s wail.

Neurons flicker in Cowboy’s mind, pulsing their messages to his crystal, keeping the craft stable as it punches up and down. He’s deep into the face as the control surfaces invade his mind, riding the wire edge of stability, skating the brink. Cowboy knows there will be deep bruises under his restraining straps, even through the padding.

He crosses the Missouri line between Louisburg and the rusting monument to the Marais des Cygnes Massacre. Parched Missouri is waiting for rain, and his dusty rooster tail is towering a hundred yards, but there’s no one to see it. The control surfaces are getting used to the buffeting they’re taking, and the movement is easier.

And then radar pulses from directly above as a new sensor drone is switched into the array. Cowboy’s blind spot has become pistol-hot and the dust signature must look like a flaming arrow in the night. Cowboy is shutting systems down from red to orange to amber and trying to make himself smaller, but the radar is right overhead and there’s no way to get out of its way. He slows down the lunging panzer and dives over the banks of the South Grand. His water plume is a lot lower than the dust and he wonders if he’s made a successful evasion, but then other airborne arrays begin to flick into existence in the nearby sky and he knows what’s going to happen. His own radar shows a fishing rowboat frozen in place on the still water, and the panzer lunges for the bank, avoiding it. He cools the engines from amber to green-best to save fuel for later. He decides it’s time to listen to what the laws have to say and switches on his police-band antenna. The privateers’ transmissions are coded but the state cops’ are not, and with a part of his expanded mind he listens to their calls of frustration as they try, with four-wheel vehicles, to follow the panzerboys as they whip their way across country. Occasionally a privateer controller comes on the air to give them advice. Cowboy has the impression that the state laws are somewhat reluctant to cooperate with free-lance mercenary enforcement, something he more or less suspected.

The radars seem to be circling more randomly now, as if they’ve lost him at least part of the time. The panzer is into Johnson County before Cowboy detects a radar boring toward him from the east, low enough to be attached to an aircraft. He triggers the explosive bolts that release the shrouds covering his weapons pods; the panzer will be less aerodynamic now and will require watching at speed. Cowboy cycles his engine displays from green to blue and makes a wide swing to the south, hoping to avoid the craft, and for a moment it seems to be working; the aircraft continues on to the north, but then suddenly it jinks, swooping directly for the panzer. Cowboy feels a wave of alcohol leaping through his heart as the engine displays rocket up to red, the panzer shuddering as it spits flame. For a moment it tries to climb aloft, the wind humming through the weapons pods like the southeast trades through a windjammer’s rigging, but gravity pulls hard on its vector and the panzer crashes down onto its cushion. As the indicators max out, Cowboy looses a radar decoy missile and kicks the panzer into a shuddering left turn, its starboard side scraping soil as the panzer mashes its cushion down. The missile continues on a straight course, its wide wings extended, keeping low to the ground. It has no radarabsorbent paint and so its signature should look about the size of an absorbent panzer; and its exhaust should attract anyone looking at infrared.